Maria Mies - Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale

TITLES IN THE CRITIQUE INFLUENCE CHANGE SERIES

Reclaiming Development
An Alternative Policy Manual
by Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel

Realizing Hope
Life Beyond Capitalism
by Michael Albert

Global Governance and the New Wars
The Merging of Development and Security
by Mark Duffield

Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
The Management of Contemporary Society
by Samir Amin

Ecofeminism
by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
Women in the International Division of Labour
by Maria Mies

Grassroots Post-modernism
Remaking the Soil of Cultures
by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash

Debating Cultural Hybridity
Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism
edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood

Male Daughters, Female Husbands
Gender and Sex in an African Society
by lfi Amadiume

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR PATRIARCHY AND ACCUMULATION ON A WORLD SCALE

In Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Maria Mies drew connections between two structures of domination that had previously been viewed separately. In showing the convergence between patriarchy and capitalism, she has pushed intellectual boundaries, and has enriched feminism, womens struggles, and movements for social and economic justice. If you want to understand the roots of the economic crisis, and of violence against women, read this book. If you want to create alternatives and participate in shaping living economies, read this book. Patriarchy and Accumulation is essential reading for all, more so today than when it was first written.

Vandana Shiva

Maria Mies vision is huge, the scale of her project breathtakingly bold.

New Internationalist

Compelling. One of the most ambitious projects undertaken by a feminist scholar in recent years.

Deniz Kandiyoti, SOAS, University of London

Feminist theory at its very best.

Off Our Backs

A major contribution to authentic development theory and practice. Women cannot hope for justice from a mode of production built on subordination either as housewife in the West or cheap labour in the third world. Mies produces an alternative feminist concept of labour and some strategic elements of its implementation. The critique is compelling.

World Development

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Mies is a Marxist feminist scholar who is renowned for her theory of capitalist patriarchy, one which recognizes third world women and difference. She is a professor of sociology at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, but retired from teaching in 1993. Since the late 1960s she has been involved with feminist activism. In 1979, at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, she founded the Women and Development programme. Mies has written books and articles that deal with topics relating to feminism, third world issues and the environment. Her other titles published by Zed Books include The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982), Women: The Last Colony (1988), The Subsistence Perspective (1999) and Ecofeminism (2014).

PATRIARCHY AND ACCUMULATION ON A WORLD SCALE

WOMEN IN THE INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR

MARIA MIES

WITH A FOREWORD BY

SILVIA FEDERICI

Zed Books

London

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour was first published in 1986 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK

This ebook edition was first published in 2014

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Copyright Maria Mies 1986, 1998, 2014
Foreword Silvia Federici 2014

The right of Maria Mies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Cover designed by www.alice-marwick.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-78360-259-9

Contents

Silvia Federici

Foreword

Silvia Federici

There are many reasons why this new edition of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale is a welcome event. Already in the 1990s considered a classic of feminist literature and required reading for activists and scholars of the burgeoning anti-globalization movement, the book is not only as relevant today as when it was first published, but now addresses an audience even more ready to appreciate its content and methodology. Proposing a vision of world history centred on the production of life and the struggle against its exploitation, this book speaks directly to the crisis that many are currently experiencing faced with the constant destruction of human lives and the environment, especially when the seeming inability of even powerful mass movements to bring about positive social change generates a quest for new paradigms.

Patriarchy and Accumulation recuperates, for a younger generation radicalized by the Occupy movement and the movements of the squares, the radical core of feminism, buried under years of institutional co-optation and postmodern denial of any ground of commonality among women. It recuperates the sense, so strong in the early phase of the feminist movement, that to speak of women is to touch something very fundamental in history and our everyday lives. For, as Mies puts it, women are not one particular group of human beings among others; they are those who, in every time and in every society, have produced life on this planet and on whose work, therefore, all other activities depend. Thus, tracing the origins of womens exploitation is to ask why and where history took a wrong turn, what are the real forces by which world history has been driven, and what is the truth of the capitalist system in which we live.